Sustainability and food waste reduction in the kitchen

Abstract

Fribo is a product-system that aims at reducing the food waste in the households. The design is a consequence of an iterative process that had started from researching the main causes for food waste in private kitchens, proceeded with the user involvement and ended with a technological solution. The graduation process that led to the creation was run by Giulia Carletto, with the supervision of David Keyson and Sacha Silvester and at Invivo, design agency in Berlin. The communication, over the distance, between the student and the supervisors was anyway smooth and clear. A summary of the process will follow. The research phase gave precise and stable insights, statistics data were analyzed in order to give a first direction. Since the goal of the project was to help the user change or reduce the habit of throwing away food, the customer journey was used to deeply understand where the difficult tasks for the user lay. Current products were observed so that the different approaches could be analyzed and new possibilities discovered. Interviews were used to understand the reasons behind the unsustainable behaviors. The results were afterwards grouped into three main categories: storing, portioning and FF2. A reflection on these categories followed and a decision was made, to proceed with FF2. This category is represented by those foods that are purchased, partially used and stored in the fridge for their remaining part. FF2 are often wasted because they are forgotten, undervalued or considered spoiled before they actually are. Different behavioral reasons explain this habits and the following task was to find a solution that would tackle all of them. The idea generation phase started and different methods were user: user observation, brainstorming, analogies, workshops and interviews. Every tool gave meaningful insights that helped the student to proceed with a clear goal in mind. One direction was initially chosen: teach the user how to flexibly use those FF2 in order to stop wasting them. The draft of a smartphone app was outlined, paired by a physical product that would help the user combine the needed activities. The informative solution was soon found to be out of track for the designer skills and lacking of feasibility in a short time development.It is believed that this step was also very valuable to the designing process and that it actually led the designer to proceed with the right path. In fact the physical product that was initially matched with the app, was chosen as a final design. This product is Fribo. Fribo is a product-system composed by three physical parts and one smartphone app. Its potential lays in the technology, recently developed, that would allow this sensor to keep track of the spoiling process of food. Fribo is the fridge box, the case for the sensor, the app interface and the device that keeps all the actors communicating together. Its functionalities allow the user to get a notification whenever any of the food that he/she stored in the box, is getting bad. In this way the consumer will not forget, undervalue of wrongly estimate the spoiling process of his/her food. During the last phase of the project, many experts were consulted, especially the creator of the technology which Fribo is based on. This steps were fundamental in order to estimate the feasibility of the system and develop its features at its best. The user involvement was also a method that contributed to create a product that can possibly improve consumers lives and contribute to the reduction of pollution that currently affects the planet. The technology is based in the use of an RFID tag that contains carbon nanotubes, chemically modified to answer to the presence of the gases that are produced by food during the spoiling process. Every food category can produce a different gas, In this way the tag communicates with the reader and send the information concerning which food category started the spooling process. The reader sits inside what is called the Router plug. In fact a smart plug containing crafted PCBs is able to detect the tag’s information, translate them and communicate to the user what it has been detected. The user, at the desired time, will daily receive a notification from Fribo that will involve him/her and inform about the status of the food contained in the box. Fribo is designed so that its maintenance and recycling process would not produce undesired waste. Fribo points at being spread in many households and help consumers reduce their unsustainable behavior. If the advantages that Fribo would produce are calculated, the situation can be improved dramatically. The positive results that would affect the environment relate to water consumption, hectares saved from intensive cultivation, CO2 spread in the air and decrease of deforested surface.